Economic History Association Taxes and Agrarian Life in Early Modern France: Land Sales, 1550-1730 Author(s): Philip T. Hoffman Source: The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Mar., 1986), pp. 37-55 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2121266 Accessed: 17-03-2016 23:46 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2121266?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Economic History Association and Cambridge University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Economic History. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 131.215.23.115 on Thu, 17 Mar 2016 23:46:07 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Taxes and Agrarian Life in Early Modern France: Land Safes, 1550-1730 PHILIP T. HOFFMAN Between 1550 and 1730, privileged investors in France-nobles, officers, and wealthy merchants-bought up enormous quantities of land from peasants. The transfer of property has attracted considerable attention from historians, but it has never been satisfactorily explained. The paper invokes the tax exemptions the privileged enjoyed to account for the transfer-an explanation that fits both the chronology of the land sales and the identity of the purchasers. The paper then examines how the tax system throttled growth in the agricultural sector. SOCIAL historians of early modern Europe have by and large ignored taxation. The neglect is perhaps understandable: social history itself arose as a revolt against traditional political history and all that it entailed, including the operations of the fisc. Yet taxation had a large effect on the common people of early modern Europe, an effect far beyond the seizure of coins from their pockets. Those who were supposed to pay taxes strove to escape the fiscal burden, and people caught in the tax collector's grip sought to manipulate the system. When the Muscovite government imposed a household tax in the seventeenth century, for example, families "doubled up to cut their taxes." The result, one historian claims, was the birth of the extended family in Russia. In sixteenth-century France the taxes levied on Parisian meat and livestock drove butchers, consumers, and livestock dealers to trade in towns outside the capital; and Parisian students worked their way through school by placing their personal exemptions from wine taxes at the service of vineyard owners.1 Moreover, the structure of taxation can inform broader issues, such as the shape of social stratification, the persistence of communal property rights, and the causes of economic stagnation. By ignoring taxes, then, the social historian overlooks their direct impact and blinds himself to a major influence on society. One such influence was the great wave of land sales in France. From approximately 1550 to the early 1700s nearly every region of the kingdom saw merchants, lawyers, royal officials, and noblemen buy up Journal of Economic History, Vol. XLVI, No. 1 (March 1986). ? The Economic History Association. All rights reserved. ISSN 0022-0507. The author is Associate Professor of History and Social Science at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125. He wishes to thank the following individuals for their suggestions and criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper: Philip Benedict, John Benton, James Collins, Lance Davis, Jonathan Dewald, Jack Goldstone, Donald McCloskey, Kathryn Norberg, James C. Riley, Hilton Root, and Ken Sokoloff. ' Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia, 1450-1725 (Chicago, 1982), pp. 413, 419, 705-6; Martin Wolfe, The Fiscal System of Renaissance France (New Haven, 1972), pp. 318, 323. 37 This content downloaded from 131.215.23.115 on Thu, 17 Mar 2016 23:46:07 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 38 Hoffman land from debt-ridden peasants, either by purchasing the peasants' fields outright or by foreclosing on mortgages. The records of the great exchange fill page after page of notarial registers, and it was obvious enough to have attracted the attention of contemporaries. In Lyon, for instance, the local historian and minor humanist Guillaume Paradin described in 1573 how the city's wealthy merchants and bankers had been buying land from peasants at bargain prices: The poor laboureurs, lacking enough to eat, were constrained to put their lands up for sale at rock bottom prices to rich people, who thereby acquired good lands and vineyards for a morsel of bread. In this way, many have built beautiful farms and villas, constructing their country houses upon the misery of paupers.2 Evidence from Saint-Genis-Laval, a small market town south of Lyon, exemplifies what Paradin observed in the Lyonnais and what his contemporaries observed in other regions of France. In Saint-Genis, peasant land passed into the hands of bourgeois from Lyon; the purchasers from Lyon were the sort of merchants and bankers whom Paradin had in mind.3 In 1388, citizens of Lyon owned a mere 4.1 percent of the land in Saint-Genis, and in 1493 they owned not much more-only 12.4 percent. But their ownership increased to 33.0 percent by the late seventeenth century-a transfer of close to 300 hectares (Table 1). Although they began a bit earlier than in other places, the land sales and the rush to invest in land in Saint-Genis-Laval were in fact symptomatic of what was happening throughout France. In Dauphine, for instance, ecclesiastics and nobles (including noble officeholders) were buying up peasant land. South of Paris, in the community of Avrainville, it was Parisians-chiefly royal officials. They increased their share of the land from 19 percent in 1546 to 57 percent in 1664- 1674. Peasants in Avrainville went from owning 47 percent of the land in 1546 to 20 percent in 1664-1674 and under 17 percent in 1688. In the nearby villages of Antony and Monteclin the story was similar: peasant ownership dropped from 26 and 27 percent in the middle of the sixteenth century to 15 percent or less in the late seventeenth century. The same story can be told of numerous other regions, from Picardy in the north to Languedoc in the south, and from Burgundy in the east to the Gatine Poitevine in the west. Nearly everywhere, the French peasant, who had 2 Quoted Richard Gascon, Grand commerce et vie urbaine au XVIe siecle: Lyon et ses marchands, 2 vols. (Paris, 1971), vol. 2, p. 841. For additional instances of contemporary complaint, see Archives municipales de Bourg-en-Bresse (Ain), AA 11; and Llewain Scott Van Doren, "War Taxation, Institutional Change, and Social Conflict in Provincial France-The Royal Taille in Dauphin6, 1494-1559," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 121 (1977), p. 84. 3 It should be stressed that urbanites were not the only outside buyers in Saint-Genis-Laval. Nor were all the purchasers of peasant land wealthy. This content downloaded from 131.215.23.115 on Thu, 17 Mar 2016 23:46:07 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions French Agrarian Taxes 39 TABLE 1 PERCENT OF LAND IN SAINT-GENIS-LAVAL OWNED BY RESIDENTS OF LYON Hectares Percent of Total Date Owned Land in Saint-Genis 1388 54 4.2 1493 160.44 12.4 1517-1518 265.11 20.5 1687 * 33.0 1787 * 25.0 * not available Source and Note: Archives municipales de Lyon, CC 49-50; Marie Thdrese Lorcin, Les campagnes de la region lyonnaise aux XIVe et XVe sieles (Lyon, 1974), pp. 382, 395; Georges Durand, Vin, vigne, et vignerons en lyonnais et beaujolais (Lyon-Paris, 1979), p. 439. Figures for 1388, 1493, and 1517-1518 were taken from Lyon tax records, which give the area of holdings belonging to residents of Lyon. For 1687 and 1787, Phad to rely upon terriers, as reported in Durand. The terriers concern only land that was subject to the seignior-a major portion of the community but not all of it. Hence, acreage totals for the terriers are not directly comparable to the earlier area totals. The figures for 1493 and 1517 differ slightly from those given in Lorcin, p. 395 (135 hectares in 1493), and Richard Gascon, Grand commerce et vie urbaine au XVIe siecle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1971), vol. 2, p. 818 (200 hectares in 1517-1518). The differences may result from their having excluded pasture land from their totals. emerged from the Middle Ages in a relatively strong position, with effective ownership of large amounts of land, found himself falling into debt and selling his property to merchants, royal officers, and nobles.4 Marc Bloch called the influx of money into land "the most decisive event in French social history," and Fernand Braudel made it figure prominently in the "defection of the bourgeoisie," whereby early modern merchants abandoned commerce in favor of land, offices, and the trappings of nobility. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie described the land transfer as changing "completely the structure of villages, of land holding, and of rural society." The land sales, he and others argued, undermined the independence the French peasantry had achieved at the end of the Middle Ages and helped create a dominant class of noble and upper bourgeois landlords.